By: Charlie Nolette, Food and Beverage Director We are all wired to like or love certain things throughout life. Some people love snow some don’t, some love chocolate and some don’t. While I don’t like snow and I find it odd that my family does, I also struggle to understand some who don’t like chocolate. The one thing that I see across all ages is a preconceived pessimism towards liking something if it has not been tried or is not known about. I think we build ideas about what we don’t like, by drawing connections to the “new thing” from the “old thing” using what we think are accurate similarities between the two. This is where food and beverage decisions can go bad. The solution involves a little bit of adventure and open mindedness on the part of the diner. Asking the right questions will take off the radar those things that are definite “don’t likes” and leave you with a couple options and one of those may be just on the edge of your comfort zone. It is at this edge that you can begin to push that “limit.” By doing this your palate will recognize something as “ok” or “not so bad,” but only if you allow yourself to think about the dish or the wine as something new WITHOUT connecting it in your mind to something that you have determined is a no go. So how do you do this WITHOUT thinking or remembering? The trick for me is to focus on the parts that I know have positive associations. For example, Chef makes a great Puttanesca for the River Club. I am not the biggest fan of olives but I am learning to eat them and here is how I have done it. I love tomatoes and capers and I often times have no problem with whatever protein or pasta he serves it with. When I eat the Puttanesca I try to forget that there are even olives in the sauce and focus purely on finding and enjoying the capers or the intensity of the tomato sauce. By doing this my palate recognizes the olive flavor, but I focus on the caper or tomato and my palate then goes to focusing on those too. This allows for my palate and mind to sort of glance over the olive and get used to flavor. By repeating this over and over with each bite, I have in a way, forced a sensory accommodation of sorts. Teaching your palate that it may not have all the info is difficult, and harder still is to retrain our minds. But by pushing the edge of what we are comfortable with as diners, this sets us on the pathway to new flavors and experiences in a culinary world that seems to never stop changing or evolving! Come join us to learn to love new foods, new wines, and new ways to pair the two!